"Wells, H G - Tono Bungay" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wells H G)

TONO-BUNGAY

by H.G Wells




BOOK THE FIRST

THE DAYS BEFORE TONO-BUNGAY WAS INVENTED




CHAPTER THE FIRST

OF BLADESOVER HOUSE, AND MY MOTHER; AND THE CONSTITUTION OF SOCIETY


I

Most people in this world seem to live "in character"; they have
a beginning, a middle and an end, and the three are congruous one
with another and true to the rules of their type. You can speak
of them as being of this sort of people or that. They are, as
theatrical people say, no more (and no less) than "character
actors." They have a class, they have a place, they know what is
becoming in them and what is due to them, and their proper size
of tombstone tells at last how properly they have played the
part. But there is also another kind of life that is not so much
living as a miscellaneous tasting of life. One gets hit by some
unusual transverse force, one is jerked out of one's stratum and
lives crosswise for the rest of the time, and, as it were, in a
succession of samples. That has been my lot, and that is what
has set me at last writing something in the nature of a novel. I
have got an unusual series of impressions that I want very
urgently to tell. I have seen life at very different levels, and
at all these levels I have seen it with a sort of intimacy and in
good faith. I have been a native in many social countries. I
have been the unwelcome guest of a working baker, my cousin, who
has since died in the Chatham infirmary; I have eaten illegal
snacks--the unjustifiable gifts of footmen--in pantries, and been
despised for my want of style (and subsequently married and
divorced) by the daughter of a gasworks clerk; and--to go to my
other extreme--I was once--oh, glittering days!--an item in the
house-party of a countess. She was, I admit, a countess with a
financial aspect, but still, you know, a countess. I've seen
these people at various angles. At the dinner-table I've met not
simply the titled but the great. On one occasion--it is my